Ahead of Russian military attack, Ukraine was hit by another cyber attack
India Today
A newly discovered piece of destructive software found circulating in Ukraine has hit hundreds of computers, according to researchers at the cybersecurity firm ESET, part of what Ukrainian officials said.
A newly discovered piece of destructive software found circulating in Ukraine has hit hundreds of computers, according to researchers at the cybersecurity firm ESET, part of what Ukrainian officials said was an intensifying wave of hacks aimed at the country.
In a series of statements posted to Twitter, the company said that the data wiping program had been "installed on hundreds of machines in the country," an attack it said had likely been in the works for the past couple of months.
Vikram Thakur of cybersecurity firm Symantec, which is also looking into the attacks, told Reuters that infections had spread widely.
"We see activity across Ukraine and Latvia," Thakur said. A Symantec spokesperson later added Lithuania.
Who is responsible for the wiper is unclear, although suspicion immediately fell on Russia, which has repeatedly been accused of launching data-scrambling hacks against Ukraine and other countries. Russia has denied the allegations.
Ukraine has already been repeatedly hit by hackers in the past few weeks as Russia has massed troops around its borders. Fears of a full-scale invasion rose after Moscow this week ordered troops to two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine. read more
Cybersecurity experts are racing to pick apart the malicious program, a copy of which was uploaded to the Alphabet-owned crowdsourced cybersecurity site VirusTotal, to see what its capabilities were.
